I read eighteen books this year, two more than in 2011. This was a comfortable number of reads. For the most part I bought the books second hand or they were given to me. Two of the books were read on my Kobo, the rest were deadtree.

“The problem is: game programming isn’t just an exercise in programming. You have to muster up the math, design, writing, and personality — especially if you want to create something original. A lot of people have it in them and the magic is there. What I’m saying is: starting everyone off with game programming is going tire most people out too quickly.”

I teach an introduction to programming course at RRC using Scratch and Processing. Some of my students build video games for their mid-course Scratch project. The project is fairly open-ended so I have students who build screen savers, choose your own adventures, music apps, animated videos, etc. Although many students do successfully implement a game, most are shocked by the complexity of video game coding.